Project Petrolhead

Most people who know me quickly twig the fact that I’m a bit of a petrolhead. This has two very strange effects: People try to ask me what car they should be buying (stock answer, Mk 7 Golf. Estate if you’re feeling nasty) and people expect me to be virulently anti-EV.

In truth, I’m not. Unfortunately, I tend to share a hobby with people who treat the presence of an electric motor as a cardinal sin, decrying a lack of “character” and “emotion”. I suspect that a large proportion of these sorts of people haven’t actually driven a modern EV. If they had, they would know that these cars are deeply impressive in their refinement and, often times, performance. The real thing I have an issue with is the current trend of building two-point-something tonne EV SUVs. This seems to have become the current norm. Current Porsche Macan? 2.2 tonne SUV. Audi E-Tron? 2.5 tonnes. Polestar 3? 2.5 tonnes. Hey, what are Lotus, that paragon for lightweight simplicity, building these days? Oh, it’s a 2.5 tonne electric 4×4. Marvellous.

I think an EV works best when inserted into the city car market, and Honda seem to agree. When designing the Honda E, their engineers decided that 140 miles would be a perfectly adequate range for a little city car given that, by it’s very nature, it’s primarily going to be driven in a city. That means short, low-speed journeys that will either finish at the owner’s house or the owner’s workplace. Honda even worked with the UK Government’s Department of Transport to determine that the average commute in Britain covers just 10 miles. The result? People were displeased.

I’m sure there are some people that commute from London to Manchester every day and twice on weekends, but let’s be honest, they’re probably an anomaly and can continue to pile hundreds of thousands of miles onto their diesel Skoda. For the rest of us though, 140 miles is probably plenty. I love a thousand-mile road-trip as much as the next person, but for 350 days of the year, I probably cover around 4 miles a day and I always end up parked within 100 yards of a plug socket.

But there is another hidden bonus for more and more people driving EVs. If less people are using fuel to do the daily run-around to work or drop the kids off at school, then there’s more of it to go around, that means it’s cheaper, that means I can afford to put more of it in my clapped-out V8 sports car. Well… on paper, anyway. In reality, if BP notice that their revenue is dropping, they’ll just put the price of fuel up to compensate. Heaven forfend that the $53 Billion in profit that they made in 2024 lose a few zeroes.

Do I like EVs then? Yes, I do. Would I own one? Of course! In fact, I’ve had my eye on BMW i3 prices for a while now because I think they’re incredibly cool and wonderfully over-engineered. Would I sell the Jag to buy one? Now that’s a trickier question. If I could own both, then I would in a heartbeat, but as it stands, I only have the space and resources for one car and I’m not quite ready to get rid of the XK just yet.

I do like the Honda E though. Just look at his little face!